Delhi, Holy Cows and Hitchhiking South, India

Chapter 18 - Hand to Mouth to India

As usual, I was sad to leave the mountains. We were high above the psychic dross of the rest of the world and going back to Delhi was in every way a descent. But seasons change and things move on. There was a beautiful beach waiting at the end of it all-so best thumb forward.

A ride with some rich kids in a car took me down to Kulu and from there I got a lift with some businessmen from the Punjab. Small shrines were to be seen at the side of the road, to mark the place where buses have gone over the edge in the past. The road swung around the curves of the valley and I must have bashed my head a hundred times on the roof. India is not a country for tall people. I wished my new friends good luck in their business and got out at the first town at the foot of the mountains. After a moment of standing around, trying to work out if there was enough daylight to make any more progress that day, the question was solved by an elderly Sikh guy who invited me for a chai. It seemed that it was always the Sikhs who were the first to help me out in North India. He played me some of the transporting Punjabi song that I'd heard in the Golden Temple and was so pleased at my evident enjoyment that he put me up for a night and gave me dinner, too.

In recording any adventure, it all sounds smooth and straight-forward but there are generally long and dull periods where you have nothing to do except think and wait. Even Jack Kerouac described himself as 'a strange, solitary, Catholic mystic' and that seems a weird description for a man who spearheaded the Beat generation in its full glory. Hoboes may blaze a trail of glory but the sparks are scattered over some bare and desolate ground. It was in these hours of introspection and endurance that I could feel myself changing.

I still had a way to go and I was tired of it all. I had to complete my journey and only hoped that there might be a literal pot of gold waiting at the other end of the rainbow. I had to find a new plot for myself as this one was wearing thin. I had a celebrated arrival in Goa to look forward to and I wondered if my hand-to-mouth mentors might have some positive suggestions to make (Write a book, one of them said, buying me a pen and a note pad).

So in the morning, I hitched on to Delhi in various trucks and cars, passing through dusty, nameless towns and I had to wrap a shawl aorund my eyes to see the road. I was taken the last two hundred kilometres to Delhi in an air-conditioned chauffeur-driven car hired by an ex-patriate Indian businessman. He was visiting family and wanted to know what i thoguht of him home country.

I caught a bus to Pahar Ganj, one of the most insane streets in the world and I strolled up and down for an hour in nostalgia for the manic times I've had to spend in this place. Most people coming to India fly in and out of Delhi and if they're on a budget, they invariably stay on Pahar ganj-as does anyone travelling up to or back from the mountains and other destinations in the area. Consequently, it has a constant stream of travellers coming to stay for a couple of nights before getting out of the pandemonium as fast as they can.

In this kind of metropolis I always feel like I have a limited time to get through and out before some mysterious predatory force swoop down upon me and break my back right there in the gutter; beggars already scrambling my clothes; ants, rats and vultures licking their lips at the prospect of fresh carrion. I finally succumb to the pull of the rot and decay that hangs thick in the air, spawning mould upon the walls, disease in the blood of the cringing street dogs and a vicious desperation in the souls of all condemned to walk these nightmare streets.

In India everything that lives is dying as fast as it can. Your shirts split at the seams. Stones in your rice shatter your teeth. Telephone lines break up in the mdidle of conversations. Power cuts leave you to crack your head open on doorways. The bus windows won'r close and so you freeze all night. You take out your moeny and find it's already torn and worthless because the bank stapled it all together. Your matchbox explodes in your hand and you run to the sink to find that someone has forgotten to turn on the water supply. The you read in the newspaper that India has tested a nuclear bomb and you only pray to god that it was manufactured by foreigners.

On Pahar ganj your face turns black with the pollution after a couple of hours and to walk the full-length of the street means to be hassled about twenty-five times on average. There are Kashmiri travel agents trying to hustle you up to their house-boats in Srinigar, beggars pointing to their deformed limbs, rickshaws wanting to take you to carpet imporiums, wallahs of incense, stickers and maps wearing down your resistance and black-market money changers stalking you in the street.

I was emotionally blackmailed into giving away my thick blanket to a persistent beggar-lady with an opiated baby on her arm. I rued my carefreeness later that night as I went to the Sikh temple to sleep. I was so cold that the attendant eventually had to roll me up in the carpet so that I could get some warmth. As I got ready to leave the next morning I bumped into a couple of friends from the mountains. No surprise as, on Pahar Ganj, you always meet people you haven't seen for ages. It wouldn't be so strange to see Elvis riding down there on a cycle rickshaw. We adjourned to a rooftop terrace for breakfast at their generous expense and I remembered what an amazing view could be had from up high.

If you were to take just a five metre section of street on camera the day's events would make a fascinating short story. Samosa wallahs fight with the cows that try to steal food from their wheelbarrow carts, travellers stumble through the chaos stoned and freaked and endless rickshaws make the world a noisier place to live in. From this vantage point the world of the rooftops was also exposed; every last inch of space was used for living and locals could be seen going through their protracted washing rituals, whilst below them in the street rise the stench of decaying vegetable matter, cow shit and buring plastic that epitomise the paradox of India as a whole.

I had a strange conversation with a man called Vijay, a second-hand book merchant on the central drag of the main bazaar in Delhi. We stood next to the piles of books that comprised the front of his shop and, whilst i choked on the fumes of a passing rickshaw, Vijay clung stubbornly to his point of view that the Muslims were a murderous race of barbarians. Surprised and alarmed by this unexpected fundamentalist streak in my friend, generally a thoughtful, intelligent man, I pressed Vijay to explain himself. He sighed as though it was a self-evident truth and then gestured at a passing cow that had just paused to consecrate the street with a jet of urine.

"They are a cruel people because they kill and eat the cow!" He explained, "And she is such a kind animal!"

For a moment I thought his eyes were gong to fill with tears. I struggled to find some objection to his hatred for his neighbours but was struck dumb by this quintessentially Indian quantum leap of logic. I just counted myself lucky that Vijay didn't ask me if I'd ever eaten beef myself. I'm not a good liar.

People who know nothing about India like to raise the subject of the holy cow as an example of the mysterious and inexplicable ways of the Mystic East. Because in America and Europe cows are seen as little more than milk factories and soon-to-be-steak-dinners; How typically superstitious for a country suffering from ,malnutrition and famine to prohibit the consumption of such an obvious food source.

The belief in reincarnation perhaps goes some way to explain the general vegetarianism of the Hindu (after all one could be eating one's own grandparents born again further down the food chain) but the real answer is far more practical: The cow is the only available animal to pull the plough in the countryside. To eat it would be suicide. Without the cow the field cannot be ploughed, nothing will then be able to be planted and the family loses its only source of income. Unless there be a passing purveyor of spare kidneys.

Most anthropologists now accept that most myth has its birth in a cradle of practicality. As such the vital role of the cow was elevated to the status of sacred. Drape a few garlands of marigolds around her neck and write her into a few adventures of the gods and Abracadabra - You've got a holy cow.

But logic never seems to get more than a few steps down the road in India before it stumbles into a pothole. While Vijay was happy enough to write off hundreds of millions of muslims as sadists, he didn't seem to care enough to lift one finger to help the cow standing in front of us. She was busy spoiling potential clown acts by eating all the dropped banana skins on the street. But then while Vijay pontificated, she began to apply herself to the consumption of a plastic bag that had been dumped in the gutter. For some time the cows in Delhi and other Indian cities were found dead without any apparent cause of death. Upon investigative surgery it was found that their digestive systems had been clogged up with up to thirty kilos of plastic. Tens of thousands of evolution never required the cow to understand the difference between cabbage leaves and polythene. Until now.

But few Indian seem to see the incongruity of venerating the cow as the Holy Giver of Life and yet allowing her to die in pain by the roadside. Such a step would involve taking responsibility for the world around them. Perhaps it would even involve getting their hands dirty in work suitable only for the lower castes. Vijay's response was a gem of disinterested Indian fatalism.

"The council must be taking care of all waste disposal of course - but they are all corrupt!" He told me with a flick of the hand that shooed the problem far away and out of sight.

Run over a cow in a jeep and you may well find yourself surrounded by an outraged an bloodthirsty mob demanding vast recompense or else retribution. Many Hindu-Muslim riots have been sparked by a surreptitious slaughter of the sacred beast. But none of those righteous Hindus would think twice about letting fall a plastic bag. Their responsibility ends in the moment they forget about it. There are many holy cows in India. Spirituality when it suits them.

Any Indian will vehemently defend the honour and reputation of his sister or daughter. But this doesn't stop the guys on the street to leer and make lewd approaches to any unaccompanied woman he sees on the street. Or in a brilliant ruse to enrol the support of the uneducated millions, prime minister Vajpayee announced on the radio that the nuclear bomb was just like when Lord Krishna revealed his Divine Nature in the holy books, saying 'I have become death, the destroyer of worlds'.

No one considers that toxic waste and mutual annihilation with pakistan are not the most sacred of prospects. And heaven forbid that anyone could have seen the virtue in spending the money instead on providing clean drinking water to the 200 million Indians who lack it.

But everything in Hinduism is holy anyway. Even disease and death and destruction. The popular elephant god Ganesh rides upon a rat. Shiva destroys everything in sight to make way for new Creation. And if everything is really going to hell then one can always say, ah, it's all just maya anyway. The dance of illusion.

But maybe part of the appeal and beauty of Hinduism is its pick and choose nature. It's not too difficult to find two Hindus who share hardly one belief in common. It's a religion that is forever changing, evolving and slipping its skin, much like India itself. However, I doubt that butchers or leather workers will rise off the floor of the social order inside the next millennium or so. However sceptical I sound on this subject, living in India has instilled within me something of the country's essential ambiguity too. I berate the destruction of the planet by the powers that be but I don't lift a finger to stop it. I believe in God(s) and trust in the universe yet also wake up terrified each day about the future. I'm sure that love is the only medicine for our lives and I spend a large part of my time running down all that I see.

And then there's the cow. I didn't once turn down a plate of beef that the Muslims had offered me. Yet in India I never miss an opportunity to slap a Holy Cow on the side for good luck and love to feed them bananas when I meet them on the street. I wear leather shoes but nothing touches me more than to watch a holy cow hold up traffic on the street; a hundred horns blaze and drivers shout every curse imaginable but they hold their ground, chewing a plastic bag, more composed than any saint you'll ever see in meditation. I guess some cows are holier than others.

I caught sight of myself in a shop window and had to blink before i recognised myself. I looked like shit but then perhaps that was to my advantage-if I wanted people to feed me then I had to look as though I needed help. On the other hand, being scruffy meant that the upper classes might not let me into their cars-Damned if you do! Damned if you don't! I found my way to the highway and got a few lifts in cars with well-educated Indians. I used the opportunity to expand my pathetic Hindi vocabulary-as a hand-to-mouth traveller, it's useful to know how to say 'I'm hungry' and 'I need a place to sleep'.

Then I got the most terrifying ride of the whole trip. I clambered on board the back of a flat-top lorry with another Indian and we hung on to a few ropes as the truck thundered along at top speed with nothing to stop us from sliding off the sides. I tensed up and said my last prayers every time a pothole bumped us a few inches into the air. My new friend seemd pretty relaxed about the whole thing though and so I reassured myself that perhaps it wasn't as absurdly dangerous as it seemed. But by the time we stopped for chai at a roadside place, after an hour of this white-knuckle riding, I was drenched in sweat from all the effort. We met an Indian guy who now lived in Florida and was taking his family on a holiday to see his home country. As if sent by the angels, he gave me a woolen blanket and 60 rupees to help me on my way. A few of the guys in the front got on board other trucks and there was now space to ride in the cabin.

There followed an uncomfortable night of shunting on to various chai stops, trying to catch some sleep in the meantime. The morning brought us close to Pushkar in Rajasthan and I arrived at this much-talked about jewel of the desert about noon.

The big attraction about this place was the holy lake and I was taken down to the water's edge by a canny brahmin priest, who made me go through the whole 'puja' (the act of 'pleasing' the gods) ritual. It was actually quite soothing to throw bits of rice and flowers into the lake, in accordance with the worship that has gone on for thousands of years in much the same way. It was also about money of course but he didn't mind that I only gave five rupees, once I explained that I was a hand-to-mouthing my way around.

It was now a tourist town beyond any doubt and the main bazaar was packed with shops selling the kind of artifacts and clothes that only a traveller would buy. This was sad as in every face could be seen the glow of greed. One look in the eyes of most of the people of the town revealed that their vision only extended as far as the next rupee.

I walked round to the other side of the lake and was invited to sit by the dhuni of a wooden hut. There was a very weird vibe and the sadhus decided not to allow me to smoke with them on the grounds that charas makes Westerners 'crazy'. It occurred to me that I didn't have to sit and listen to this kind of shit and so I walked on, meeting another sadhu who beckoned for me to sit in his little clay room. He became enraged when I didn't even have a cigarette to offer him and so I walked out with a bad taste in my mouth.

Children approached me with cries of 'one rupee' and 'schoolpen'. Thanks to the tourists who showered them with these handouts in the past, now the rest of us have to endure these endless requests. Sadhus begged persistently in the street and I was fed up of the whole thing. I climbed up to a temple on a high rock but was refused permission to sleep there on the grounds that it was only for 'Pushkar babas'. I said to hell with the lot of them and made my way out of town.

I slept the night in the train station of the adjacent town of Ajmer and got some quality kip on a bench. The magic of the dawn made up for the sourness of the previous day and some chai shop guys gave me a breakfast of tea and biscuits. It took a while to get a ride this morning because not all of the trucks trucks were permitted to enter the state of Madhya Pradesh that we bordered.

I finally got moving and spent the day adjusting my body to the continual jerky motion of the trucks that rolled along at about 30kmph on terrible roads. Progress was unbearably slow as the drivers were forever pulling over for cups of sickly sweet chai or else to wash at the roadside cafes. They poured jugs of water over themselves in their underclothes.

Otherwise they might pull over to check the condition of the huge tyres by rapping them with a spanner and listening for the tell-tale clunk of punctured rubber. If there's one thing that India tries to teach me, it's patience.

The first palm trees started to appear, though not yet of the coconut-bearing variety and the bushes full of flowers of red and orange. I was cheered to see that some brightness could survive the relentless dust that rose in dull clouds as we trundled past. I counted the kilometres wearily and reflected that the days of drives in Mercedes-Benz on smooth autobahns were now a long way behind me.

I spent the next night in a train station too and had dinner with a few opium farmers who told me they had never seen a white guy before. Indian cities all seem the same to me although here I attracted a lot more attention for no tourists have cause to come through these parts. India has fifteen national languages and god knows how many dialects but English is still the unifying tongue in India and so i could sommunicate okay. With the influence of the hugely popular Bollywood Indian film industry Hindi is gradually suplanting English as the national tongue but i suspect they'll just end up mixing the two together.

A cold wind blew as I waited for a ride in the morning. It was hard to believe that I was in the middle of India. I waited for about four hours before a ride with a motorbike revealed the reason for my slow progress, as we passed sixty trucks all held up due to an accident. Then we scooted past another one hundred and twenty trucks stuck on then other side. Everywhere people were working and I had to remind myself that, whatever else I might have to go through, at least I wasn't planting potatoes. The trucks that I travelled in represented an age that was a century ahead of the lives of the peasants working in the fields. I wondered what it all must mean to the furry caterpillars that took ten minutes to cross the road.

A Sikh chap (driving trucks is a respectable and popular profession for these folk) took me to Indore. In accordance with the typical kindness of his people he gave me twenty rupees for my food that day. I hopped out by a chai stall and spent three anxious minutes trying to find out where I could go and shit. I shouted 'Latrine! Latrine!' at them but had to give a mock demonstration until they finally got the idea.

When I returned, I was handed some bananas and chai and was taken to the home of the grumpy stall-holder who gave me dinner and a bed. I tried to deafen myself to the shouting and sounds of violence in the other room and grimly recalled what a dark world India can be.

I was given a breakfast of 'buoy' in the morning, which is a pleasant dish of fried potatoes, onion and garlic in turmeric, topped with lemon juice, coriander and pomegranate. Then they stopped a driver who agreed to take me to on to the Narmada River and we were off. I didn't know much about the place I was going to, except that it was supposed to be very shanti and picturesque. But with the barren scenery around, I couldn't visualize how that could be-until we turned a corner and thick forest began to flank us on both sides, continuing all the way to the small town which derives an income form the steady flow of pilgrims.

My destination marked the point where the two holy rivers converge and the island that is the site of their meeting, is accordingly considered a place of power-Shiva power. Shiva is probably the only really cool god and is hugely popular in India. He gets stoned, he dances, he hangs out in loin cloth and dreadlocks and is tough enough to have Kali for a wife - how many other gods could handle waking up to a woman with 108 skulls around her neck?

I caught a boat across the two hundred metres to the island and felt like I'd stepped back a century into an untainted India. Stepped ghats ran down to the water and women scrubbed their laundry on the stone next to pilgrims taking baths and making puja to please Shiva. I slipped quickly up the steps to avoid the brahmins who would undoubtably want to smear red paint on my forehead, in the hope of a few rupees. I walked through the noisy bazaar until I found a place by the river where I could try and erase six days of dust from my travel-worn body.

That done, I started to make my way around this island and the atmosphere began to quieten as I walked. Small temples containing huge phallic lingums watched from the side of the rocky path and donation boxes stood by to receive baksheesh from pilgrims.

Up above the path I saw a mud hut that looked like a sadhu's residence. A woman with top-knotted dredlocks beckoned me for chai. I scrambled up the path that led to the shack and sat down with her and her husband. My pitiful Hindi was soon put to the test but it was easy to get along with this couple who, until ten years ago, were simple farmers. They were just a couple of country-folk potato-planters and one day they just jacked it all in to embark on the sadhu way of life.

They invited me to stay with them and I and the husband slept outside under the light bamboo shelter - until the rain came and we scampered inside the hut for shelter. We woke at 4am and the male sadhu went straight outside to shit and wash (of course, the woman had had to attend to these duties hours before, in accordance with Hindu 'propriety') to purify himself for this magical hour of the day when all babas rise and shine. His wife busied herself with the morning chai, whilst he put on his glasses and recited out loud his mantras and Shiva salutations for the morning.

When daylight came, I followed the husband down to the convergence of the two rivers and left him to do his wandering about sadhu thing. The morning was strangely melancholy and though it was all very beautiful and traditional and all, I felt quite at a loss to know what to do. I felt like I was trespassing on a world that had nothing to do with me. I started thinking about just getting back on the road towards the homeground of Goa.

As I was mulling in this feeble melancholy, a French guy that I passed beside a chai shop invited me over for a glass of chai. He was an excellent character called Jean-Pierre and he was interested to know why I wore the pink colours. I explained that it just made it easier with the Indians, to not have to explain why I had no money all the time and he nodded in understanding.

"Ah good! I saw you and said to myself 'Is this guy on a fake sadhu-trip?'" He told me how he had done much the same journey twenty years ago but that he had continued this way of life for seven years-after that period of time he was jailed in Thailand for seven years. He saw it as a poetic balance of life-tides.

He explained to me that prison was not the cage that most people imagine and that time was just a concept of which we can be the master rather than the subject. He was a cool and collected cat who regretted nothing and did not look like he'd been on the road for twenty-five years. When I told him how I had felt like leaving the island at once, he smiled and said:

"Ah no! This is just the Shiva energy of the island working on you! The rivers here are different to that of the Ganga in Benares, which is much more shanti-tabla and flute drifting story-here the rivers are much more strong and like Shiva, you know? And people come here with much energy and they meet with what is here and bounce right off!"

He was right. Once I cooled off a bit and took things easy, it became a lot easier to hang about. I played jazz beside the river and smoked charas with some of the sadhus I met. But because I didn't speak the language properly, I was never able to penetrate the surface of life in India and so I didn't quite sink into the feel of this place.

The Indians who lived here were of a low-caste and consequently had very few pretensions or illusions about their lives. They were easy-going company and their daughters were unbearably beautiful-but I knew that they were well beyond my reach.

There was quite a lot of malaria about and it was kind of eerie to know that locals were going through the fever just a few houses down. It made me look at mosquitoes with a different eye-but what to do? The malaria tablets are heavy duty chemicals and some of them can cause blindness and other ailments if taken for more than a few months

( I returned with a friend to visit them six months later and discovered that they seemed to do rather well out of their hospitality towards Westerners; their stick and mud hut now had a huge metal door hinged to the front (never mind that a chicken could have pecked its way in through the back). Then, whilst I was assuring my friend that there was no nee to worry about the malaria 'because after all, the locals deal with it okay'-we turned to see the old sadhu erecting his new mosquito net. )

I should perhaps have spent more time here, absorbing the subtle riches of the area that take a little time to appreciate. But I was re-reading Kerouac's "On The Road" and was being filled with the get-up-and-go energy that fuels mind-less expeditions. Riding in rackety old trucks at 30kmph along routes that seem more like river beds than roads is hardly what any of the Beat generation had to contend with. But the spirit of the thing was with me and I hungered for the sea.

Using half of the 100 rupees that Jean-Pierre had given me, I bought a load of groceries for my sadhu couple and tried not to get too upset by the cheek of the boy who hoped I'd forget my fifty rupees change. Back at the shack they were very appreciative of the food and the wife at once set about preparing a huge meal, insisting that I eat three times my fill. I felt like I was back in Iran.

I woke about 3am and left them my woolen blanket, slipping out of the mud hut without saying 'goodbye'. I played jazz by the river until the light came and then made my way back into town, where devotional music of 'Om namah Shivaya' could already be heard at full pitch though the sun had not yet risen.

I hitched a ride back into Indore and had to make a quick exit when the drivers asked for money at the end. I realised that that was the accepted protocol around here and afterwards I made sure to always explain to the truck guys that I had no money to give them before getting in. The folks around here had a mean and hungry look and it was many hours before I was able to get moving.

When I did get a ride, it was in a small pick-up truck and in the course of the journey into the state of Maharastra, we took on board four or five individuals who paid for their ride. We had to swerve to avoid many others who attempted to accost our vehicle in the most aggressive hitchhiking I'd ever seen.

The hills here were high and green and as evening came we seemed to be moving onto new lands. I was let off at a truck stand, where I was given a meal and a rope bed to sleep on by the smiling chai-shop wallahs.